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Obama Wiki fiddler caught red-handed

A right-wing pundit has been caught red-handed manufacturing
controversy after claiming US President Barack Obama's Wikipedia
page was being whitewashed, in a scandal that fooled big news
outlets including Fox News.

The entry also did not mention concerns surrounding Obama's
eligibility to serve as US commander-in-chief due to an alleged
lack of proof that he was born in the US, Klein said. But Klein
neglected to mention that there was an entire Wikipedia page
dedicated to the Obama citizenship claims.

The claims are regarded in the US as conservative conspiracy
theories.

Klein claimed Wikipedia's army of volunteer editors were quickly
censoring edits on the Obama entry and appeared on Fox News airing
the claims.

He reported that a Wikipedia user, Jerusalem21, had attempted to
add in the missing details but they were quickly deleted by a
Wikipedia administrator for being "fringe" theories. When the user
attempted to add the details a second time he was suspended from
Wikipedia for three days.

Klein did not identify who owned the Jerusalem21 account but
further digging by the ConWebWatch blog discovered that the only
entry the user had tried to edit other than Obama's was Klein's.
Jerusalem21 had created Klein's entry and edited it 37 times,
adding several links and pictures.

Claims that Jerusalem21 was Klein himself are backed up by
discussions by Wikipedia administrators on the talk page attached
to Klein's entry.

"It reads as a total puff piece and was obviously heavily
influenced by Klein himself and cronies/sockpuppets at WND," one
wrote.

Further, when questions were raised about the identity of
Jerusalem21, Klein edited his original story to remove references
to Jerusalem21, replacing them with "one Wikipedia user".

Eventually, in response to emailed questions from Wired News,
Klein admitted he had a hand in engineering the facts used to stand
up his scandal. But he blamed the Jerusalem21 edits on his
researcher.

"I am not 'Jerusalem21', but I do know the Wikipedia user (he
works with me and does research for me), and I worked with him on
this story," Klein said.

It is not clear whether he was referring to Klein but Wikipedia
founder Jimmy Wales recently wrote on his Twitter page: "Conspiracy
theorists are exhausting. The facts mean nothing to them; their
pursuit of a villain trumps all. Any response only brings ire."

WorldNetDaily has a history of attacking Wikipedia and Obama. At
the time of writing, two of the lead stories on the site are
headlined "Obama earns an 'F' on performance" and "Has Obama been
snubbing U.N. chief?".

In December, WorldNetDaily editor Joseph Farah, miffed that his
Wikipedia entry had been modified to include a line that he was a
"noted homosexual", wrote an opinion piece labelling the free
encyclopedia "a provider of inaccuracy and bias" and a "wholesale
purveyor of lies and slander unlike any other the world has ever
known".

In May last year, another article accused Wikipedia of promoting
porn by including "detailed photos of nude homosexual men engaging
in sex acts and a variety of other sexually explicit images and
content".